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Last week, one of our founders posted this in our fund WhatsApp channel:
“The day finally came when a customer rebuilt our app using Claude Code. It navigated our app and replicated it. They published a podcast talking about how they did it. #saaspocalypse. Has anyone else dealt with this yet? How did you deal with it?”
10+ founders responded right away. Many said something similar had happened to them recently, and shared what they did.
Two weeks earlier, I had a similar conversation over dinner with founders in Vancouver.
Before I get into the advice, one thing I want to say up front: Software has never been a true moat. It used to be harder to replicate, but a customer or competitor could always do it.
The view from both rooms was that this is happening to almost every startup, and it’s not a major threat. Most of the time, the customers doing it are a poor fit who were getting little value from the software anyway.
I’d categorize the advice into two buckets.
1. Software is not your product
A great product is a bundle of services delivered through software. That bundle can include:
→ Access to a network: Services, data, or providers you can’t get to without volume or doing the work
→ Coordination across your customer’s team: Single-player software is much easier to vibecode than software that gets people across a company working together
→ Safety, security, and maintenance: Someone has to patch it and fix it when it breaks. A vibecoded copy lasts until its builder moves on.
→ Getting better as the technology gets better: Your product improves with every new model. Their copy is frozen the day they build it.
→ Being liable for the service: Customers get someone accountable when things go wrong, and most will pay to keep that risk off their books.
2. Continuous execution wins
As Jason Goldlist put it in the WhatsApp group: “Focus on my customers. Software could always be copied to some extent, but team velocity, go-to-market support, brand, etc. cannot be AI’d.”
A few other suggestions from the group:
→ Get sharper on buy vs. build (budget, politics), your ICP, and where your differentiation actually comes from. More on this here!
→ Narrow your focus or go headless. One founder shared: “One strategic mindset we’ve been adjusting, in the face of vibe-coding buyers, is that breadth of your product a customer doesn’t use can be seen as baggage. If your product work was finding the common denominator between 99 systems so you could integrate with them all, customers that only use one can see that work as negative value.”
Software was never the moat. What’s changed is that customers can now use it to negotiate better prices, or just copy what you do.
If you keep increasing the value you deliver and understand where your real advantage comes from, you can still build a massive company with moats.
We’re bringing founders from two Canadian Rocketships (Jobber & Stay22) to Together Toronto next week to hear how they grew their customer base and built strong moats over the years. Save your spot!
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